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Abstract

Malta is one of the latest parliamentary democracies to adopt a mechanism (Gender Balance Reform) for affirmative action aimed at increasing women’s descriptive participation in Parliament at par with the average at European Union level. This paper looks at three key moments in Maltese history to explain how critical actors addressed women’s participation in politics: a) The first self-government constitution of 1921 that was granted under colonial rule; b) the achievement of universal suffrage in 1947 and c) the introduction of the Gender Balance Reform in 2021. This article examines archival materials to present how Maltese women in well-placed positions became critical actors in political parties, academia, civil society, the media and the state, and how they individually or collectively pushed for political change. The author also brings her first-hand insights into the process as Chair of the Technical Committee, which led to the reform to explain how it was presented as a historic, necessary and inevitable step, a narrative that garnered a broad consensus within political structures. While there was ample internal debate and even some resistance, the insights and input of women and the support of the party leaderships helped to open the way for positive action.

Reflections on the corrective electoral mechanism introduced in Malta in 2021 - Prof. JosAnn Cutajar, University of Malta

Abstract

This article will examine the sentiments and discourses that were expressed in newspapers when the gender corrective electoral mechanism designed to increase the number of the least represented sex was going through parliament and its perceived impact once it was implemented in 2022. Malta is one of the countries in the European Union with the lowest share of women in national parliament (Harwood 2022). To remedy this, the Maltese constitution was amended in 2021 to allocate 12 additional parliamentary seats for women when a 40 percent share in elections was not attained. There have been other corrective mechanisms in the past (Bezzina, Brown and Marmara 2021), but these did not create such a furore. In this paper, critical discourse analysis will be used to analyse a sample of newspaper articles published in English from January 2020 to April of 2022. The sentiments expressed in these articles tended to veer from broad support to all out condemnation. This paper focuses mainly on what female politicians and experts had to say about Maltese culture in general, the political system, and whether or not the mechanism in the 2022 succeeded in its objective.